Chapter 126: Poor Thor Gets Tased Again
I... I am Thor. God of Thunder. A god.
You may not believe this, but I was very close. I was nearly there. My father was almost ready to acknowledge me. The throne of Asgard was within reach.
But now.
Everything has changed.
I don't understand what I did wrong. All I wanted was to prove to my father that what he could do, I could do as well. That I was ready.
But here I am.
My divine power stripped away. My armor removed. Exiled from the realm of the gods by my father's own hand.
The throne and the recognition I had nearly touched are now impossibly distant.
And to make matters worse, I've landed in the middle of a group of buzzing mortals.
Thor opened his eyes slowly. He looked at the people gathered around him with unconcealed irritation.
Darcy's expression brightened the moment she saw him. "Do you think he needs CPR?"
"I'm actually quite skilled at CPR."
Nobody acknowledged this. The others were occupied with looking closely at the man who had just fallen from the sky.
Thor managed to get himself upright, though not without difficulty. He was unsteady on his feet, staggering enough that someone who didn't know better might have assumed he'd been drinking.
"Hey." Jane looked at him. "Are you all right?"
Thor gave her a cold look. He gave the whole group a cold look, and then ignored them entirely.
"Mjolnir?!"
"Mjolnir!" He shouted for it twice in quick succession.
But Mjolnir no longer recognized him, and no amount of calling was going to change that.
He was like a man calling for a wife who had long since decided she was done answering. He kept calling. She kept not responding.
This left the man with nowhere to put his frustration except the people around him. "Hey! Have any of you seen my Mjolnir?!"
He directed this at Matthew and the others.
Darcy had been briefly distracted by his face, but the shouting brought her back. She took two careful steps backward.
"Okay, so. You're very handsome. But it's also pretty clear to everyone here that you've had too much to drink. Do you need a police escort home?"
Jane, by contrast, was barely paying attention to Thor at all. She was looking at the ground beneath their feet, where a pattern had burned itself into the earth, the unmistakable signature of the Bifrost.
"WTF?! Erik! Matthew! Come look at this!" She pointed down at the pattern, voice raised. She felt something click into place, the particular feeling of a mystery resolving.
Like crop circles. The real thing.
She started photographing everything in reach, talking to herself as she went, narrating what she was recording.
Erik, by comparison, had worked in the field long enough to be harder to excite. His attention had stayed on Thor from the beginning.
His read on the situation: this man had been caught up by the storm and dropped from a height. And a fall like that didn't come without consequences.
"The photographs can wait. Our immediate priority is to get him to a hospital."
He looked at Thor, who was standing in the middle of the field shouting at the sky. Calling for his father, by the sound of it.
Was it possible the fall had damaged something important?
Because what other explanation was there for a grown man shouting for his dad at the empty sky in the middle of the night?
"Heimdall!"
"I know you're watching! Open the Bifrost! Take me back!"
Thor's attitude toward everyone around him was consistent: he looked past them, around them, and through them as though they occupied a lower tier of existence that his current circumstances forced him to share. When he deigned to look directly at any of them, the condescension in it was practically solid.
When the shouting produced no results, he turned to Darcy. "You! Woman!"
"What realm is this?! Alfheim? Nornheim?"
"There's no '-heim' here," Darcy said. "This is New Mexico."
"New Mexico?" Thor's brow drew together. "You're lying to me."
"There is no realm called New Mexico."
"How dare a mortal lie to a god?"
"This is unforgivable."
"You—"
Zzzzt.
The sound of an electric current split the quiet night air.
Thor went down like a beached fish, every muscle in his body seizing. Even so, he fought to turn his head. He wanted to see who had the nerve to apply electricity to his person in that particular location. He was nearly there. He almost had a clear view.
The current was turned up. The look on his face locked in place and the muscles gave out all at once, and he was down.
Matthew stood over him for a moment, then jabbed him twice more to rule out any possibility of a tactical recovery.
Then he straightened up.
"Stop wasting words on him."
"The way he's carrying on, he probably hit his head. There's no other explanation for standing in a field at midnight shouting for your dad."
Darcy:
Erik:
Jane:
"Anyway. Let's get him into the vehicle."
"Whether something's actually wrong or not, we take him to the hospital and check him over. If he dies later and we never got him checked out, that becomes a very unpleasant problem."
Matthew was perfectly certain that Thor, God of Thunder, was not going to die from a taser. But he did need a plausible reason to draw a couple of tubes of blood from the man.
That was the whole point of being here.
Build a little goodwill. Take a blood sample. See what a god's blood actually looked like under a microscope.
The reasoning was sound enough that even Jane stopped arguing. The group worked together to drag Thor to the vehicle.
A short while later.
An Umbrella-operated hospital.
Thor was transferred to a gurney and wheeled inside. Then came the standard processing: blood work, CT scan, MRI, the full run.
"That's..." Jane looked up at something. "I'm not a doctor, but. Does a blood test usually need blood donation bags?"
The attending doctor opened his mouth and closed it.
"You're not familiar with this procedure. That's understandable." Victor Gideon stepped forward from the side with a polished smile. "This particular patient's situation is somewhat unusual. We need to collect a larger volume of blood than normal for the testing, so the bags are simply more efficient."
"Oh, I see."
Jane wasn't a doctor, and Victor Gideon sounded thoroughly authoritative. She nodded and accepted the explanation.
The sealed donation bags were taken away.
Shortly after, the electrocuted Thor stirred and opened his eyes.
Say what you would about the God of Thunder.
Electrical resistance was exceptional.
He was back up faster than anyone would have predicted.
And he didn't disappoint.
First order of business upon regaining consciousness: volume.
"You! You dare assault the son of Odin! Thor, God of Thunder!"
"OUTRAGEOUS!!"
He shoved Victor Gideon aside and turned to face the hospital staff who were already hurrying over.
He didn't run. He planted his feet and prepared to meet them.
In his mind: I am a god. A god does not lose to these people.
Facing the incoming nurses and doctors, he went through them methodically, sending more than one of them airborne in the process.
Say what you would about a god stripped of divine power. The baseline physical capability left over still put him considerably beyond ordinary people.
"Security! Security!"
"Get security in here now!" Victor Gideon was picking himself up off the floor, talking through his teeth.
Jane and the others had backed against the wall, each of them clutching an IV stand, not entirely sure what they were planning to do with it.
"I am Thor, son of Odin! I CANNOT be defeated!"
"Charge—"
Zzzzt.
The familiar current filled the hospital room.
Thor looked down at the taser in his backside, a solid line of question marks assembling in his expression.
Come on. Same spot again? Why was it always the same spot?
Was it not understood that even gods had certain anatomical vulnerabilities?
He had more to say on this subject, none of which made it out of his mouth, because the taser was still running.
He collapsed again, and once again never managed to see who was on the other end of it.